24 NOVEMBER 1990, Page 24

CITY AND SUBURBAN

Conservative freedom doesn't work? Oh, well, let's try Conservative planning

CHRISTOPHER FILDES

The Conservatives in their third term of office were flagging and feuding, the by- elections were disasters and the polls looked worse. Isolated and embattled, the Prime Minister still sought to point the way ahead: 'We won the last election on: Conservative freedom works. We'll win the next one on: Conservative planning works.' Those were the sulphurous last days of Macmillan. Planning, then as now, had begun to find friends among the disaffected, as being the thing we had not tried lately, so maybe it was the secret of our competitors' success and we should give it a whirl. Tuesday's vote must whirl it forward. Markets may come to look on this as the week when power began to slip away from them. They have had their decade, but there will always be people who think they know better — and who think that their turn has come again. Macmillan had taken this not much further than estab- lishing councils of the supposedly wise and well-meaning, of which Neddy — the National Economic Development Council — survives. Neddy was devised to bring governments together with the two sides of industry, defined as management and un- ions. No chair at Neddy's table for finance or markets, but in a planned economy they are expected to do what they are told. Nigel Lawson as Chancellor had few words for Neddy, and those few were discourag- ing. John Major's polite style of chair- manship may have been mistaken for encouragement, for Neddy's stock is off the floor, and before its last meeting the TUC hinted that the unions might deliver wage restraint if only people would pay them more attention. The planners in the Heseltine camp (and, of course, in the Kinnock camp) are talking in terms of sponsorship, giving each industry its chums and partners in Whitehall, and building the Department of Trade and Industry into the powerhouse of industrial strategy. Building on the DTI, it always seems to me, is like trying to win at Monopoly by building on the green squares. It is quite within the rules, but experience shows that the odds are against it. Conservative planning's greatest difficulty, though, is not so much economic as political. It can always, as Macmillan discovered, be outflanked when Labour promises more — a National Plan, a Department of Economic Affairs, George Brown, the works. Even Con- servative planning doesn't work like that.